HOW THE LOCAL FOOD MOVEMENT IS SWEEPING THE NATIONBy Kristin Henderson, chief veggie conversationalist

Our food system is broken, but word-of-mouth is changing it. People are telling each other about their personal experience with local food, one friend at a time.

For Margo LaMarsh, it started at Bible study. That’s when a friend told her how Seasonal Roots was connecting local families with local farmers.

“Eating better is all about cooking with fresh ingredients,” says Margo. “And there’s nothing fresher than local food.” So Margo joined her friend and became a member of Seasonal Roots.

Because local food is fresh, it has more nutrients and tastes better, so those good nutrients are more likely to get eaten. That’s what Margo discovered when she served Seasonal Roots beets to her high school daughter.

Her daughter was not a veggie eater. “I don’t like beets,” she said.

“When did you ever have beets?” Margo asked – knowing full well that before then she’d only ever had pickled beets from a jar. “You have to take one bite.”

When she finally took that bite, she exclaimed, “These are so good!”

Margo hadn’t done anything special with them. She just wrapped them in foil, roasted them in the oven, and peeled them afterward when the peel practically falls off. “When it’s fresh, you don’t have to do much. They taste good all by themselves,” Margo says. “So I’m a firm believer that the only reason she liked them was because they were so fresh.”

Now her daughter eats pretty much anything veggie. And Margo, who used to work for NASA before becoming a stay-at-home mom, now works for Seasonal Roots. She’s a neighborhood market manager, pictured here with Josh of Harvest Hill Farm on delivery day, making weekly deliveries to members in York County.

Margo acknowledges that eating more fresh local food requires a little more planning than eating processed food out of a box. “But having it delivered saves you time,” she points out. And as her husband says, “We use that time to cook more, which is a lot more fun than going to the grocery store.”